The Digital Resource Commons (DRC) is a robust, statewide platform that enables institutions to save, discover and share—free of charge—the instructional, research, historic and creative materials produced by the University System of Ohio and Ohio’s liberal arts colleges. It benefits instruction and research by providing a single access point to Ohio’s scholarly knowledge. The Ohio Digital Resource Commons is part of the Ohio Digital Commons for Education, a collaborative initiative of the Ohio Learning Network, OhioLINK and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, to develop leading-edge education resources, services and capabilities in Ohio.

The UA DRC is The University of Akron’s institutional repository system. A university-based institutional repository manages and disseminates digital materials created by the institution and its community members. Hosted by OhioLINK, the UA DRC is an initiative of University Libraries that contains digital resources of scholarly, historical, and pedagogical works owned and submitted by The University of Akron. The UA DRC is designed to enhance open access and advance scholarly communication through the dissemination of historic, research-based, and instructional digital materials.

Q: What is an institutional repository?

A: An institutional repository is defined as "software and associated rules used to capture, structure, provide access to, and preserve digital materials produced by an organization or community" (Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005).

Q: What is the DRC?

A: The Digital Resource Commons (DRC) is a robust, statewide platform that enables institutions to save, discover and share-free of charge-the instructional, research, historic and creative materials produced by the University System of Ohio and Ohio's liberal arts colleges. It benefits instruction and research by providing a single access point to Ohio's scholarly knowledge. The Ohio Digital Resource Commons is part of the Ohio Digital Commons for Education, a collaborative initiative of the Ohio Learning Network, OhioLINK and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, to develop leading-edge education resources, services and capabilities in Ohio.

Q: What is the UA DRC?

A: The UA DRC is The University of Akron's DRC institutional repository created and hosted by OhioLINK for the UA community. An initiative of University Libraries, the UA DRC is designed to enhance open access and advance scholarly communication through the dissemination of historic, research-based, and instructional digital materials owned and submitted by The University of Akron.

Q: Who administers UA's DRC instance?

A: The University Libraries currently administer UA's DRC instance.

Q: What are the benefits of the DRC?

A: The DRC enables easy, quick, and reliable access to the university's research, historical, and scholarly materials and preserves these materials digitally on the World Wide Web. A permanent, stable URL is assigned to each item and can be used as a citation.

Q: How is the repository organized?

A: The DRC is organized hierarchically into communities and sub-communities that mimic the University's organizational structure. A community is a group within an institution, usually a college, division, or administrative unit of the university. Communities sometimes contain sub-communities for departments, offices, or institutes of the parent community. Each sub-community contains collections of digital materials that belong to that sub-community.

Q: Are other universities using the DRC?

A: Yes. Other OhioLINK institutions have their own DRC instance and are contributing content to the DRC. For a list of member institutions with a DRC instance see the OhioLINK DRC website . Other institutions throughout the country and the world are also contributing materials to a number of institutional repository systems. For a list of institutions using DSpace, the software that runs the DRC, see the "Who's Using DSpace" page on the DSpace website.